I felt nothing for women, sexually. I would have been grateful for even the slightest arousal, which I still half-expected any day, but there was nothing, not anything. Sometimes women would take an interest in me, but my unresponsiveness quickly sent them away.

On only two occasions did I try anything with a woman. The first was when I was 20. I was sitting with two of my friends in a college courtyard one day when somehow we met a girl named, I think, Judy. She was only 17 or 18 but already a sophomore, and she had, she let us know, been around with older men. Not only that: German men.

The conversation became a little more explicit, and pretty soon we began to gather that she might be interested in one or more of us. And that evening she called me.

So one night soon after, I ushered her into my dorm room and closed the shutters. She smoked; we talked; I waited for something to happen, supposing that something would happen and hoping I would make a go of it. For a change, I felt grown up. An assignation! (With a smoker!)

Finally, when she got tired of waiting, she said, "So. Aren't you going to take your clothes off?" Gulping, I did, as matter-of-factly as if in the fitting room at Macy's, though I kept my undershorts on. She drew back and took me in, head to toe, and said, "God. Your legs look like you just escaped from Auschwitz."

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I am happy to report that even then, at that memorable moment, I understood that this was funny. Not because she was kidding (she wasn't), but because the whole situation was absurd. An asexual man-boy tries sex for the first time at a moment of existential vulnerability and she says—what? I could hear the cosmos chortling, though I was not myself in a laughing mood.

After that, you can imagine, a whole different sort of halfheartedness was added to my list of problems that night. I was not aroused, not even close. There was some pointless rubbing. She left.

I, to my own surprise, had little trouble putting the whole incident aside. Mercifully, her comment had given me just cause to fail. Whatever my assignation had been, it was neither sex nor romance nor even affectionate exploration, I understood. It was irrelevant. And so I shrugged and took it in stride.

The second time was different. By my last year in college, I had become close friends with Elissa, a tall, sharp-minded, good-natured woman in the junior class. We became intimates, saw some movies together, took some meals together. A night came in March when we were talking together in her room and it was late and there was no one around. One of us (me?) wondered if maybe I should be with her that night.

She was willing. I was eager. Not, I mean, sexually eager: hardly that! I knew, however, that if my mature sexuality was ever going to arrive, this was the moment. It had to be now. I was alone with a girl I liked, and she wanted me. All the ingredients were there to flip the switch.

The only thing I needed to do was tell her my awful sexual secret, since it seemed imprudent not to give her fair warning that the flight might be a choppy one. This was something that I had never said to anybody, although I knew full well that plenty of people suspected it. So, mustering my nerve, I swallowed hard and told her the truth. "I'm a virgin," I confessed.

She knew. She knew, she didn't mind, she was not much more experienced, she expected no virtuosity. It was perfect. I rushed downstairs, found a condom, roared back upstairs, took off some clothes, turned off some lights, dived into bed. It occurred to me, about then, that I had no idea what to do.

I mean not that I had no idea. I had seen a few magazines and the odd movie or two, so I had a clear mental image of where I was supposed to wind up and what I was meant to be doing there. What I lacked, however, was any clear plan for getting into that position. For nothing was happening. I might as well have been in bed with a walrus.

I no longer remember what I tried or what she tried. We both gave up after less than an hour and just lay there. I remember being naked and feeling humiliated, sunk; I remember eventually putting my underpants back on; I remember her professing not to mind. I crept back to my room the next morning, after a night of little sleep in a narrow dormitory bed, the unopened condom still in my pocket and no joyful smirk on my face.

After that I never tried again with her or any other woman. For a week, I sank into a depression such as I have never known since, for my failure, not only to get aroused but to feel any guiding spark of eros, could mean only one thing. I now was forced to confront a truth about myself I had hoped never to have to face.

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?

If the American dream has not quite shattered as the Millennial generation has come of age, it has certainly scattered. Living affordably and trying to climb higher than your parents did were once considered complementary ambitions. Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.

The dissolution of the American dream isn’t just a feeling; it is an empirical observation. In 2014, economists at Harvard and Berkeley published a landmark study examining which cities have the highest intergenerational mobility—that is, the best odds that a child born into a low-income household will move up into the middle class or beyond. Among large cities, the top of the list was crowded with rich coastal metropolises, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York City.